Hello, Mr. Chips: Writer faces his face in print and packaging

Perhaps I'm oversensitive to my public image this week because this Friday there will be a new photo of me to go along with this column.

MARK LANEFOOTNOTE

Look for me in the snack aisle. That was where I noticed Publix supermarkets had redesigned the packaging for their Original Thins house-brand potato chips. And they found a design that people would naturally respond positively to: A picture of a potato chip equipped with glasses, a nose with roughly the proportions of an equilateral triangle, and a bushy, uneven moustache. "Nice-looking chip bag," I thought. I've been noticing a distinct lack of moustaches on supermarket shelves ever since Brawny paper towels made the unfortunate decision to go cleanshaven 10 years ago. It's good to see somebody bucking the trend. And I thought nothing more about this until the comments started. "Did you see yourself on the chip bag?" asked our head photographer. "We have rules about commercial use of your image," my editor reminded me. Personally, I didn't see any resemblance. But as a social experiment, I posted a photo of bag and columnist on my Facebook page and polled the public. The results were discouraging. "Is that the real bag and not one some artist drew with your picture?" one person asked. "Demand royalties!" wrote another. "Wow! That is better than being on a Wheaties box," wrote another. I don't know about that. It's a humbling thing to realize one's personal essence can be easily reduced to a few squiggles superimposed over a popular snack food. It's amusing when someone finds a potato that looks like Richard Nixon. But few of us would know how to react should the potato look like any of us. "Really, it's the shape of the potato chip that makes the head work," said my wife, in that not-at-all-insulting tone public relations professionals instinctively use to convey obvious factual information. Perhaps I'm oversensitive to my public image this week because this Friday there will be a new photo of me to go along with this column. The News-Journal is getting a new look and that extends to columnists' pictures. Column photos allow columnists to feel they're aging differently from other people. It's a fringe benefit of the job. My current column picture was taken nine years ago, so at least in public, I haven't changed a bit since 2004. And really, I like to think I haven't. Such continuity in print is hardly unusual. Within our pages, the picture that went along with the Dear Abby column showed Abigail Van Buren with the same dark-haired flip for decades, unchanged from the mid-1980s back to, oh, I don't know, sometime during the Warren Harding administration. And there was something reassuring about seeing this over breakfast each morning. It's a kind of immortality, actually. So now, I must face up to the passage of time, and it's not easy. Sheesh, all that and a bag of chips.